A.B. Razlatsky & Proletarian Democracy

[trivas7]

In the 1970's a Russian intellectual, A. B. Razlatsky, influenced perhaps by the cultural revolution in China (as were many at the time) concluded that the "dictatorship of the proletariat" that supposedly existed in his country was a fiction disguising the rule of a parasitic strata that was exploiting the working class and suppressing its revolutionary energies.

Razlatsky responded by creating an underground communist organization that aimed to restore a genuine proletarian dictatorship to the then Soviet Union. Razlatsky's underground group organized workers for strikes and similar work stoppages in defense of their basic rights. The authorities eventually discovered the existence of this group and in December 1981 Razlatsky and one of his collaborators, Grigorii Isaev, were arrested and sent to the Gulag. Eventually, under Gorbachev, they were released. Razlatsky died in 1989. Isaev went on to lead a very militant strike (in 1997?) of five thousand workers (which included a factory occupation and the months' long blockage of the main avenue in Samara, a city of 1.5 million). Isaev was arrested twice in the course of this struggle and each time released under international pressure.
Razlatsky's theoretical work includes "The Second Communist Manifesto" (1979), "Notes in the Margins of History" (1989) and many other works. He is most well known for two theses:


The political economy of the Soviet Union had more similarities to feudalism than either capitalism or socialism.
In a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat the workers' party would be completely distinct from the state (so much so that party members would be required to resign from the party before taking a position within the workers' state.

Is anyone familiar with this comrade or movement?

http://struggle.net/proletarian-democracy/related.htm#proletarism (http://struggle.net/proletarian-democracy/related.htm#proletarism)

[Lynx]

In a genuine dictatorship of the proletariat the workers' party would be completely distinct from the state (so much so that party members would be required to resign from the party before taking a position within the workers' state.
There is a similar inclusion in Jacob Richter's work, The Class Struggle Revisited. Hope this is discussed further.

[Die Neue Zeit]

Well, in my particular case the "dictatorship of the proletariat" and the "dictatorship of the party" would be synonymous if only because of the immense size of the latter (not just a typical "mass" party here according to Kautsky's "pragmatism"). Trivas, Razlatzki said in his "Second Communist Manifesto" that state officials wouldn't have to tender their membership cards in resignation, but rather just their voting rights within the party.

Elsewhere on this board I have stated notable exceptions to this ("prestigious" state positions and, hopefully just initially, security positions - otherwise Lenin and Dzerzhinsky wouldn't have been full members of the party ;) ).

[ComradeOm]

The political economy of the Soviet Union had more similarities to feudalism than either capitalism or socialismA major problem with categorising the economy of the USSR is that it was fundamentally different to anything seen before or since. Razlatsky's attempt to force a square block into a round hole is one of the less impressive that I've seen. The industrialised USSR of the 1970s shares virtually none of the traits associated with those of feudalism. I don't know the rational for this assertion (working solely off your link here) but from the article posted it appears a simplistic attempt to denigrate the "corrupt strata of self-serving feudal lords" in the fashion of older "crypto-Trotskyite counter-revolutionaries" slurs

[Nothing Human Is Alien]

Today, Grigorii Isaev leads the Party of the Proletarian Dictatorship in Russia.

[Die Neue Zeit]

A major problem with categorising the economy of the USSR is that it was fundamentally different to anything seen before or since.

I have an old Theory thread on the possibility of multiple modern modes of production (succeeding multiple modes of pre-capitalist production):

http://www.revleft.com/vb/multiple-modern-modes-t75252/index.html

The four key points are:

1) Ownership of the MOP (status of the capital market)
2) Control over the MOP (PROBABLY indicative of the status of the labour market)
3) Plan or market (status of the consumer goods and services market specifically)
4) How surplus value is extracted (chattel slavery, wage slavery, or irrelevant under a labour-time economy and "communism" afterwards)